The Cassini data sets have provided remarkable new insights about the processes at work among the rings and small moons of Saturn. Guided by these discoveries, we will seek out and investigate related phenomena in the ring-moon systems orbiting Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. We will employ data from Voyager, Cassini and New Horizons, complemented by the best publicly available data from HST and from the W. M. Keck Telescope. We will apply new and powerful image analysis techniques that should enable us to obtain significant new results from old data.

The objective of this proposal is to generate several higher-order data products that will substantially reduce the level of effort required to analyze Cassini's optical remote sensing data sets (ISS, VIMS, CIRS and UVIS), by eliminating the need for most scientists to perform their own navigation and geometric reconstruction.

This is an unsolicited proposal to perform the initial scientific analysis of Pluto’s tiniest moons, the recently-discovered “P4” (S/2011 (134340) 1; Showalter et al. 2011) and “P5” (S/2012 (134340) 1; Showalter et al. 2012b). It will enable the P.I. to determine the bodies’ orbits, shapes and sizes based on all of the available Hubble data, using established measurement and modeling techniques. The results of this analysis will be published promptly and will be presented at a scientific workshop about the Pluto system in July 2013.

This is a new, five-year proposal to support the work of CIRS co-investigator Dr. Mark Showalter on behalf of the Cassini Project. It is a successor to our current cooperative agreement, NNX06AC85A. The predecessor agreement has supported the Cassini-related activities of Dr. Showalter and his SETI Institute colleagues Dr. Stu Pilorz, Robert French and, briefly, Dr. Nicolas Altobelli.
This report provides a brief summary of our accomplishments during the previous agreement and outlines our plans for the years ahead. The Cassini Mission is now expected to continue into 2017, so this proposal describes our planned work for most of the remainder of the Cassini tour. Our activities encompass conducting fundamental scientific research with the CIRS data, plus meeting a large and continuing set of responsibilities for mission operations and planning.

The Voyager flybys remain our best source of data for the Uranus and Neptune systems, and provide key reference points for continuing studies of Jupiter and Saturn. However, because the Voyager mission pre-dates NASA's focus on archiving, the data sets remain difficult to use. We propose to modernize the Voyager data sets by (a) producing calibrated and geometrically corrected versions of all the images; (b) generating accurate, continuous "C kernels" describing the pointing of the instruments during each Voyager flyby; and (c) using this information to generate detailed geometric indices describing the contents of the Voyager images and spectra. The resulting volumes of derived products will be delivered to the Planetary Data System. This work will ensure that the Voyager data sets remain easily usable by the scientific community for many decades to come.